The Academy Award for Best Motion Picture is one of the Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only to vote on the final ballot, but also to nominate. During the annual Academy Awards ceremony, Best Picture is reserved as the final award presented and is usually collected at the podium by the film's producers and director. However, only the producers are officially credited with receiving the award. The Academy Award for Best Motion Picture is considered one of, if not the most important of the Academy Awards, as it is the final result of the collaborative producing, directing, acting, and writing efforts put forth for a film. The Grand Staircase columns at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, where the Academy Awards ceremonies have been held since 2002, showcase every film that has won the Best Picture title since the award's inception 80 years ago.

History

At the 1st Academy Awards ceremony (for 1927 and 1928), there was no Best Picture award. Instead, there were two separate awards, one called Most Outstanding Production, won by the epic Wings, and one called Most Artistic Quality of Production, won by the art film Sunrise. The awards were intended to honor different and equallyimportant aspects of superior filmmaking, and in fact the judges and the studio bosses who sought to influence their decisions paid more attention to the latter - MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who had disliked the realism of King Vidor's The Crowd, pressured the judges not to honor his own studio's film, and to select Sunrise instead. The next year, the Academy instituted a single award called Best Production, and decided retroactively that the award won by Wings had been the equivalent of that award, with the result that Wings is often erroneously listed as the winner of a sole Best Picture award for the first year. The title of the award was eventually changed to Best Picture for the 1931 awards.

Since 1944, the Academy has restricted nominations to five Best Picture nominees per year. As of the 80th Academy Awards ceremony (for 2007), there have been 460 films nominated for the Best Picture award. Throughout the past 80 years, AMPAS has presented a total of 80 Best Picture awards. Invariably, the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 80 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 59 have also been awarded Best Director.[1] Only three films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated (though only one since the early 1930s): Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The only two Best Director winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are likewise in the early years: Lewis Milestone (1927/28) and Frank Lloyd (1928/29).